Airplanes, cats, guns, war, the more than occasional rant about the kleptocracy of President Spanky and his party of treason, the spinelessness of the Democraps and ramblings about anything else that flits through the somewhat offbeat mind of an armed lesbian pinko as she slides down the Razor Blade of Life.Caveat lector.

Words of Advice:

"Never Feel Sorry For Anyone Who Owns an Airplane."-- Tina Marie

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

"Flying the Airplane is More Important than Radioing Your Plight to a Person on the GroundWho is Incapable of Understanding or Doing Anything About It." -- Unknown

"There seems to be almost no problem that Congress cannot, by diligent efforts and careful legislative drafting, make ten times worse." -- Me

One of my early readers and commentators, Lurch, died in 2008. I wish that his stuff had been archived somewhere. Jon Swift, Jeff Huber, William the Coroner, Frank James were bloggers whose stuff I enjoyed reading and who have gone west.

It's been a good ride. Lord willing and low water, I'll be around for awhile yet.

Saturday, July 30, 2016

I haven't seen this yet: The cartoon would of one of those Russian nesting dolls ( a matryoshka doll). The outer doll would be Donald Trump; the cartoon would show a hand lifting the top of the outer doll to show that the inner doll is Vladimir Putin.

Reall, Mikey? You said that with a straight face? For the love of Your Dear and Fluffy Lord, your running made is Donald the Insult Candidate. He does little else other than hurl insults and threaten to punch out those who speak ill of him.

Trump is a thin-skinned little bully and Pence is a walking, talking version of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.

Teardowns and overhaul for a R-2800 engine runs about $75K or so, so $150K for two. That's not figuring the need to overhaul the prop hub and replace the bent blades, nor the airframe work for when it was ground down by sliding on the runway. And one of those engines was fresh; it was just hung on the airplane less than two weeks ago.

Given that, then can anyone trust that the Russian spooks didn't alter any of the emails?

Having said that, imagine, if you will, that the Chinese hacked into the RNC and published things to embarrass the GOP and Trump. You can bet your next paycheck that the same media outlets who are studiously downplaying the Russian angle would be waving their bloody flags of outrage.

The Russians have interfered in our electoral process. There needs to be an official response beyond strong words.

Don't forget this: Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News. Murdoch has business interests around the globe. If he comes to the realization that a Trump presidency would threaten those interests, then look for Fox News (including Lumpy) to drop Trump as though The Donald had contracted AIDS and rabies.

Microsoft has to be pleased that its bid to buy Yahoo eight years ago for nearly nine times as much cratered.

In which lunatic asylum was this deal hatched? I have had one Yahoo account; to call it "spam-ridden" would have been an understatement. The last time that Yahoo mattered as a search engine was when a Clinton was president.

Some troll of a banker is getting filthy rich from this deal. That's the only way it makes sense-- another corrupt bit of financial chicanery.

The premise is that Trump's business empire would have collapsed without Russian money. After his string of commercial bankruptcies and dealings boring from shady to deceptive, American banks probably wouldn't make an auto loan to The Donald. So he turned to Russian money.

So, Russian tanks roll over the border of Lithuania. Sometime between when they have occupied Vilnius and before they bang a hard left and advance on Warsaw, maybe a President Trump might have decided whether or not he will agree to keep our commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty.

It doesn't take a hard look to realize that the history of Trump is that his word is no good. If he were to be president, our country could not be counted on to fulfill its commitments under any treaty or agreement.

Now imagine, if you will, changing the religion that he identified with in that speech. There would be riots in the convention center and uproar all of Fox News and their ilk.

But there's not. Pence is a card-carrying member of the Christian Taliban, best known for signing a "no wedding cake for faggots" bill into law. So it's OK, as far as he and his people are concerned, to write their particular bits of religious-based bigotry into the statute books.

To recap, the guy who was shot by police did everything that he was ordered to do by the police and still got a bullet for his trouble. And if the timeline is close to correct, one might assume that the cops were hoping that the shot guy would bleed out before the paramedics showed up. For there seems to be zero evidence that anybody rendered first aid.

UPDATE #2: There were three chip lights, not just one. But nothing was found. The chip lights are helicopter ones, they're very sensitive. IIRC, HSL-34 used the call sign "Green Checker ###" for their aircraft. One was informally known by the host Knox FF's crew as "Chip Light 240", because a lot of that bird's flights ended that way.

Last time I checked, possession a firearm after a felony conviction is good for a five to ten year stretch. Between that and the other charges, it's hard to imagine that if Tyrone Hernandez had committed those crimes, that ol' Tyrone wouldn't be going away for a lot longer than 33 months.

The other day, he ate his dinner a little too fast (he can down a can of Fancy Feast in under 4 minutes). A little bit later, he horked some of it back up. Once he was done, he inspected the mess and ate the pieces of food that he deemed to be worth of salvage.

I had forgotten how entertaining it can be to watch a young cat at play. He throws the toy mice and chases them. Sometimes he gets some good air on them and he'll twist around to grab them.

Well, if we're also going to test every Christian and deport those who believe that Biblical law is superior to the Constitution and the U.S. Code, then fine, let's do it.

The first guys marched onto the deportation ships will be Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, plus that jerkoff of a judge on the Alabama Supreme Court.

So, Gingrich wants to give people a religious test, whether or not they are naturally-born citizens, with no regard to how many generations that their family has been here, and then strip citizenship from those who don't pass his test.

Davis is a rich man, but even he looks like a poverty case compared to Adelson. Adelson could pay for the whole thing out of his walking-around money.

But why should he if he can con persuade the bozos and saps in Vegas to? And the biggest sap there is Mayor Goodman.

I've watched this play out in city after city, and most of them are basically too retarded (or too corrupt) to not fall for the con job that is having a pro sports franchise. And given that Al Davis moves his team more often than Scott Brown changes his residence to run for Senate, only a complete and utter fool or a tool would agree to putting up public money to host the Oakland Pirates.

Whether Mayor Goodman is a fool or a tool is better commented upon by those who live there.

First off, by the accounts that I've read, the suspect was contained. He wasn't going anywhere. Using a bomb-laden robot to end the standoff was lazy-ass police work, in the same way that the FBI burned 76 people to death in Waco in 1993. The Dallas police chief ordered a summary execution.

Second, where does it stop? If the suspect was barricaded and inaccessible to the robot, would the cops have evacuated the building and blown it up? Are artillery strikes now on the table? Nerve gas? is this how the po-po are going to handle standoffs in the future-- call in an airstrike? (Don't forget that they have done that before and it didn't work so well.) If a suspect is fleeing, will the cops rustle up a gunship and hose down the vehicle?

Third, you're going to find few "conservative" voices who are questioning any of this, other than maybe thesetwo posts. Similarly, the number of "conservatives" who were disquieted by the MOVE bombing were similarly low. By no means is "conservative" disquiet anything like those expressed when an FBI sniper opened fire at Ruby Ridge.

And before you say that Waco and Ruby Ridge were different, allow me to point out that both incidents got rolling when Federal LEOs were killed.

So now we are in a place where a police chief can sit in his office and press a button to summarily execute a suspect, for personally pushing the button and ordering that the button be pushed makes no moral difference.

If you believe that the cops have the right to summarily execute people, then you should question your belief in freedom, liberty and the rule of law.

Families of men who fought in the World Wars and Korea, who may have wanted to learn what their fathers and grandfathers did in the conflicts, were essentially shit out of luck. Especially if the men never talked about it.

So the cop thought he was pulling over a bad guy. When it transpired that the guy had a gun, the cop, who still thought that he was dealing with a bad guy, shot him. Even though the guy wasn't reaching for it.

In short, it was a bad shoot. I don't know how they're going to get out of not bringing manslaughter charges against him.

Men have been killed by police because the cops thought that cell phones or wallets were guns.

Seeing what you expect to see and not being open to questioning your assumptions is a hard thing to do. This one cost one man his life, may effectively cost another man his and may cost the people of that municipality many millions of dollars in damages.

Maybe Bill Clinton could have gone back on George Bush's word. He didn't. And the other bitter truth is that NAFTA would have not passed without Republicans, who largely supported it, when Democrats did not.

But hey, complaining that "Trump ignores facts" is like complaining that "bears shit in the woods".

Saturday, July 9, 2016

When he's sleeping, he goes to Jake's hidey-hole under the bed. I expect he'll eventually settle in and sleep on furniture.

George, Gracie and Jake were all contemporaries, so it's been a very long time since I had a young and agile cat. George was fairly agile, up until his end. The other day, I found Chip on top of the kitchen cabinets. I raised my voice and he quickly got down. Whether he knows that he's not supposed to be up there or that he's not supposed to be up there when I'm at home and awake remains to be seen.

George had the attitude of "your food is my food", which Chip seems to share. Chip was annoying me as I made lunch the other day, so I gave him a piece of red-leaf lettuce. He took an energetic bite of it, then realized that lettuce wasn't something that he wanted to eat.

When he wants attention, he literally gets in my face for it. He's a cuddler.

The Brits have been part of a European single-market, in one form or another, for over 40 years. The EU came into being over 20 years ago. Which, as I gather, means that all of the trade deals between the EU and other nations have been negotiated by the EU, sort of in the same way that Iowas doesn't negotiate trade deals with Vietnam.

When the UK leaves (or is booted from) the EU, they're going to need to negotiate trade deals with everyone. The Brits will need to get some crackerjack trade negotiators and get them up to speed and on the governor in a pretty short timeframe.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

So, on a day when the news cycle should have been about the Feebies giving a pass to Hillary, he kept this story going. Which is insane. Somebody with some smarts would have known that the thing to do would have been to issue a general denial and then just shut the fuck up and let the story peter out.

Day 1: Walk into his/her office and say: "Gee, I think you're a great public servant, please accept this $25,000 donation for your campaign."

Day 2: Walk into his/her office and say: "I'd like to suggest that you support/oppose Bill No. ###, as that is near and dear to my heart."

Day 3: Again, walk into his/her office and say: "I don't believe that your timepiece reflects a person of your stature. Please accept a gift of this Rolex."

You might think that is bribery. It apparently isn't to the Supremes. For them, it has to be "vote for/against Bill ###, here's $25Gs."

And so, the American Oligarchy marches on. If you're not rich, the only time most of the politicians want to hear from you is on election day. The other 729/1,459/2,189 days of their term, they really don't give a rat's ass what you think.

Basically, the only thing they didn't find was an evil cabal of neocons. But as to everything else, such as over-reliance on suspect intelligence, going to war when other options remained, and faulty postwar planning that could be considered to be criminally negligent, yeah, they found all that.

They found all that despite stonewalling and obstruction from both the British and American administrations, including refusals to release the conversations between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.*

The Iraq War was a lie. Worse than a lie, it likely qualified as a war of aggression, which is a war crime.

Don't hold your breath that any of the architects or deciders of that war will ever be held to account for it.
__________________________________* Or, "Chimpy and the Pig-Fucker", if you prefer.

The Saudi monarchy has been fostering and spreading a fundamentalist sect of Islam for decades. They are, in no small part, responsible for the spread of terrorism around the globe, whether they have funded it (as they have with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS) or morally encouraged it.

Some of it is not surprising, They're not the first kleptocratic monarchy to use religion as a justification for their actions. But it's been an unspoken deal that the Sauids would pay the terror groups and the terrorists would, in turn, not hit targets inside of the kingdom.

Monday, July 4, 2016

2. I see more and more people traveling with "therapy" dogs. I'm 99+% sure it's bullshit. They want to take their little rat-dog with them on the plane, they don't want to put it into a carrier, and so they get a doctor-friend to write them something justifying the little mutt as a therapy dog. You can bet that, as they go about their daily affairs, that they don't take little Pootsy with them.

3. Some guy got a ride in a wheelchair from his flight down to baggage claim area. He's holding a cane between his legs. After he got out of the wheelchair, and the wheelchair attendant disappeared, the guy tucked his cane under his arm and walked briskly out of the terminal.

240 years ago, the Continental Congress quit dragging its feet and realized that the American Colonies, at least the northern ones, were already at war with the British Empire.

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Friday, July 1, 2016

The Battle of the Somme began 100 years ago this day. The British Army had almost 60,000 casualties on the first day of the battle.

One of the more insanely stupid ideas that the Brits had were to form "Pals Battalions". units made up of men from one area. Their idea was that men would be more inclined to enlist if they were to serve with their friends and neighbors. When one of those units suffered heavy casualties, well, you can imagine the impact back in Old Blighty.

That's just what happened at the Somme.

One of the sadder things of Western military tradition is that flag officers who are incompetents and wastrels of their men are allowed to retire gracefully, instead of being shot.

The Rough Riders got the glory, but they fought in support of an attack by the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry. That was a point that the press pretty much ignored at the time, but that the historians haven't.

Rule No. 5: Terms of Service: Political appointees of the Obama and Bush Administrations may not read this blog unless they (i) post a comment confessing same and (ii) acknowledge that both men are war criminals. This blog may not be read by members of the Arizona Legislature.

Violation of this term is a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and you're off to share a cell with Chris Christie, asswipe.

Rule No. 6: If I wanted you to write a "guest post", I'd ask you. Don't bother asking me to put one up from you. I won't. Start yer own goddamn blog.You Have Been Warned.